Iconic
by Spawn Guy
Summary: A tale of webs, capes, responsibility and humanity.
1. Rescue

**Iconic**

Our not so surprise guest star belongs to DC comics. If you don't know who Spider-Man belongs to then if I had a distinct lack of morals you'd be very easy to mislead. Unfortunately he belongs to Marvel. Who have more lawyers than I do. But at least _I_ wouldn't have made House of M suck! Before we begin I would like to point out that this story is very much Pre the big tows major story arcs. Infinite Crisis hasn't happened yet, in fact this might work better in context in John Byrne's post crisis continuity, more personality wise than anything else. The other hasn't happened yet, nor has Avenges Disabled. So Peter isn't an Avenger, living in Stark Tower, capable of talking to insects and (here's the important part) known as Spider-man to the entire planet. He's still packing the mechanical web shooters and the spider signal belt light, which he had for years in case you don't read the comics or that far back. Enjoy.

My name is Peter Parker…and I've been Spider-Man since I was fifteen years old.

Many of you are doubtless wondering how I made it all the way through college. Well quick survey, how many people here married to a super model?

No keep them up, I want to make sure I count all those hands.

Not that I can see much right now. Iron beams collapsing on top of each other are inconsiderate beasts. Barely any room, doubt Reed Richards could even crawl through.

Or stretch. Whatever. Brains screwing up a little. Maybe we've got less air left than I thought. The glow from my belt light only shows more rubble over head. Not good.

Gwen coughs in my arms, and it pulls at my heart beneath the stupid spider emblem splashed across my costumed chest. It means so much to her right now, but it won't be worth a damn thing if I can't pick up the pace and dump it back up top again.

"Hey, stay with me, okay honey? We're going to get you out of here, alright?"

Her eyes open, like they have to be held open by little elves. With weak arms.

"Kay."

Barely heard that. Got to move. Now.

But there in lies the rub…we can't. Wall crawling might have gotten us up this far, but that meant leaving behind anywhere I could set her down. Meaning I can't loosen up both hands to move these things out of the way, and even if I could do it with just one hand (which I can't by the way) I'd bring the entire building down on her. More than it already has anyway.

The word I'm looking for is "Parker Luck". And also rhymes with "Ducking".

Note to self, never agree to follow J Jonah Jameson anywhere. Ever. I doubt why I even have a Spider Sense nowadays, I can already see the troubles coming before that little rolled up hedgehog feeling starts up at the back of my skull. And yet here we are.

I never thought I'd actually miss New York, and the situation probably wouldn't be better off there anyway, but at least I'd be on home ground. When Aunt May convinced me to take a chance to see the sights of the city of tomorrow, somehow I doubt she was talking about roughly ten floors worth of Metropolis architecture. At least I'll die knowing my corpse gets to fertilize the soil of one of the classiest cities on the planet. The place probably looks spectacular from the air, cathedral like spires mixed with art deco and Greek/Roman temples redone in glass and steel. Looked pretty nice from the train window. Or so Ben Urich told me. I wouldn't know, I was standing in middle class because my ticket wasn't part of the two for one deal ( that Jameson, what a saint!)

Surprisingly, the entire reason I'm here for this sky scraper to decide to dump itself on me might be because Jonah does in fact have a soul. Some award ceremony for an old friend, Perry White of Metropolis's own Daily Planet. They were cub reporters, covering the same story in Chicago way back when. They hated each others guts the moment they met so naturally they became the best of friends. At first glance you'd have no idea why; White's cool under pressure, tolerant, impartial, tips his waiter, and has no moustache. Then some freckled red head guy almost spills punch on his tux and as my ear drums almost burst all I can think is _There it is_. He's a publisher and he's got a loud voice. Go figure.

Turns out I wasn't just there because of my photojournalistic talents…or maybe I was. Kinda. Mr Redhead was revealed to be _the_ Jimmy Olson…cub photog with up close shots of Doomsday and Braniac's skull ship Jimmy Olson. Trailed by married reporter couple Lois Lane and Clark Kent. She kept her last name. I'm assuming its not because there's anything _wrong _with the name Kent but a little alliteration seems to go a long way with this town. Like Lex Luthor. Go on, say it out loud.

So there they all were. On White's side of the table. Who's won an award for the umpteenth. And on Johan's, Ben Urich, who's actually won the same number of Pulitzers as Lane and Kent put together and me. Who's got a shot of a certain web head under my belt for every shot of a certain local Metropolis legend Olson's ever taken. Old friends being old friends, in their own way. Everything goes on okay for the next couple of minutes. We mingle. Well, I try. I grew up with an elderly couple in Queens. I actually _studied_ in College. I can recall the exact number of wedgies I received in high school in my head. I split my time between juggling a job and a vigilante career and remembering my wedding anniversary. My best friend can light himself on fire and lives in a giant number four. Socializing isn't one of my better spider powers. I catch Kent over by the punch bowl and find he hasn't actually drunk that much. That makes the two of us just about the only completely sober people in the room. We talk. Nice guy, would have liked to have talked to him in high school, share a swirly or two. Then I got that sub atomic explosion from my spider sense.

Two floors down. Something big.

I'm about to make some excuse to Clark before he actually does my job for me; he goes to find the restroom.

"A little punch goes a long way, right? Excuse me Peter."

Weird, but it made my job a little easier. He's got the restroom so if I move fast enough I can get roof access and back in time to check up on things right? Wrong.

I'm halfway out of my clothes, mask and one web shooter on before the screaming starts. I sneak a glance. Kind of regret that now.

Otto Octavius is brawling his way through the room, trying to get those crazy arms of his around some kind of metallic thing. Trying to punch a hole through it's chest. I know Ock pretty well, we shared some laughs, he threatened to blow up the city, I shot some web in his eyes, good times, but I'd only ever heard of his shiny new dance partner. Metallo.

Practically unbreakable (albeit missing any adamantaium) metallic body inhabited by the brain of a small time con by the name of John Corben. Nice guy, given the death threats he was throwing at Ock. The good doctor had quite the radiation fetish back in the day, and he apparently hasn't buried the radioactive hatchet.

Get this; years ago a planet several light years away exploded, theoretically due to the unstable nature of it's core in it's death throws. Every inch of advanced technology and society gone in the fiery blink of an eye. Tragic, especially when you consider the effect it must have on the sole survivor. All we have left to remember this long dead planet by, along with said survivor, is irradiated fragments. The kind of fragment acting as Metallo's heart/power source. Kryptonite. Whether it was going to science or the black-market I'll probably never know seeing as Otto wasn't considerate enough to announce _that _part of his plan out loud, but he came all the way to Metropolis for it, and if I know him as well as I do he wasn't taking "No" for an answer. And Metallo clearly wasn't a fan of the "Give me your soul!" idea.

They tore their way through most of the building before going through the window. That was my cue. A blast of Jonah's "Menace!" gig ain't a kiss from MJ, but it does my heart good when I'm going in against not just one of _my _major psychos but someone else's. I actually got a couple of jokes out before things really went to hell.

Me showing up didn't do a lot for Metallo's sunny disposition.

"First an octopus, now a bug! I am _not _putting up with anymore New York trash!"

Bet he said that to his last girl friend. Ooooh, score one for Spidey humour!

Then he picked Ock up by the arm (one of the metallic ones, bottom right hand one as I recall) and threw him at me. Fun. For an encore, he proceeds to plough through the side of a near by building with all the grace and subtlety of Wolverine on a good day. And the central support beam as a matter of fact, brining all the buildings floors crashing down on its occupants. Score one for the Parker Luck.

I get to kick Ock in the head before diving in there (again, not encouragement from my darling wife, but the sound of "Accursed arachnid!" followed my generic death threat number one hundred and five is a real motivator when your not playing on your home field).

Good news, there were only two people in the building, a father burning some mid night oil and his daughter biding her time until he took her home or out to dinner or what ever normal people do. Bad news, the father was on the other side of the room getting his coat when the building really starting falling in. I swung in, snagged him with a webline and tugged him out of there just before half the ventilation system obliterated where he'd been standing. For all my enhanced speed an agility, I didn't have time to try the same thing for his daughter standing in the centre of the room.

I can barley remember back when MJ and I were going to have Little May. Still stings.

I head her father yelling her name at the top of his lunges; "Gwen!"

How am I not suppose to save her with a name like that?

I managed to swing-and-snag her out of the way before the ceiling collapsed, tugging my web line down with it, just as the floor gave way giving us a longer fall to the sub basement before the support beams prevented the rubble from crushing us, thus saving us, yet also trapping us by forming one hell of a mess over our only way out.

And here we are. I've managed to get a couple of feet before we hit this particular blockage. I've felt our air supply running out the whole way.

She coughs again. I think I'm going to collapse. While technically upright. Nice.

"Just hold on…"

This isn't fair. She's not even blonde, but just the thought…I'm as over it as I'll ever be, but it hurts because this is closer than I ever got on the bridge so long ago…and I still can't save her.

I can't save her.

But maybe someone else can.

This is his city right? He deals with this kind of stuff all the time, its like me dealing with a mugging or a jewel heist (although nobody does those anymore) but he can save that many more lives. Hell, this'll all be leaves in the driveway to him, I've seen pictures of what happened when he tried to take on the Hulk in New Mexico. Not even Thor came as close as he did. He's theoretically the most powerful person on the planet, supposedly. Despite my team up track record I've never seen him in action outside of live news feeds but he's the Man of Steel, right? Change the course of mighty rivers and so on.

Gwen coughs.

Hero time. Even if it's not me. Here's hoping Super-hearing actually exists.

"Hel.."

Throats dry. Get it together Parker. Swallow. Deep breath. Pray.

"Help me…"

Keep going, you can't do anything else, if you stop now you'll never start up again…

"Help her…Superman…"

I wait.

Nothing.

Gwen coughs. it's the weakest so far. I can't look her in the eye.

_Mary Jane…_

Then…Spider Sense…

There's a grinding sound, the rubble shifts. I've heard that sound before, every time I've ever seen Thor or Ben Grimm shift through a mess like this. Dust swells between the cracks and I place both arms around Gwen, holding her tight as it swirls around us, more for my sake than for hers. But she's not afraid. She's a Metropolis girl, born and bred. She knows what's coming. She's not afraid. The rubble is suddenly sporting a gaping hole, moonlight ramming me right in the face like smoke form one of Wolverine's cheap cigars. I should probably say something about that to him.

I begin the rest of the climb up before I see the hand in front of me. Then I see him. Hovering right in front of me in honest to god red and blue with red trunks and cape. He gives me a smile that's like watching the birth of a star.

"Need a lift?"

Oh God. Oh my God. Okay don't panic, don't throw up, say something witty…

"That'd be swell."

Smooth. He smiles again. I smile back and then stop because he can't see it. Or maybe he can. Does he really have X ray vision? Did he look through my mask? Did he see my face?

Oh my God…

I give him my hand, spending all the strenght I'm not using to hold onto Gwen to keep it from shaking. Oh my God…

I remember one time the FF supposedly teamed up with this guy in deep space. Johnny would not shut up. Oh my God…

"Superman!" Gwen yells, and I almost drop her as my heart cuts out.


	2. Quest

The big guy is still smiling as hovers us up out of the wreckage, cape dancing like a horse charging across the planes.

Okay, what am I, gay?

I half expected my hand to shatter when I took his, not out of nerves or anything, but just because of the sheer strenght. I should know better though, I've teamed up with people possessing well over class one hundred strenght before. If he wanted to rip my hand off, I could probably do it myself and it wouldn't be half as painful. But he just holds us steady.

Which brings up an interesting point; he's holding me, and I'm holding Gwen. Why not carry both of us? Does he…trust me or something?

Because if so, this marks one of the first hero meets hero situations where I didn't waste half an hour getting my ass handed to me by the other guy. As for the making an idiot out of myself part…

Absently I notice my belt light is still on. Its only after I see it shining on the crowd below that I actually hear them. Maybe I'm in shock or something. Must be, because it takes me a couple of seconds to realise their cheering. Chanting even. For me? Wow, sure are a hell of a lot of them. But my name isn't…

Oh right.

Metropolis. Him. Of course.

Then something familiar.

"You menace! I _knew_ you'd follow me here! Couldn't stand it, eh? Wanted to take me out huh? Tried to take us all out at once? I knew I had you running scared! Believe _me_ you haven't seen anything like the full power of the press yet! You just wait! You're web spewing ass _will be on my wall!_"

That's Jonah. Eyes always on the balls. So he can bust mine. Superman keeps smiling down at me, not in condescension, but in amused curiosity. I think.

"You get that a lot?"

Okay, yeah, he's amusingly curious. Time to make up for that "Swell" abomination.

"Actually, no. He just never got his fan club membership badge. I told him it got lost in the mail, but what are you gonna do, right?"

Its not my best one liner, but he laughs and from my other arm I hear a giggle. Gwen's smiling at me to.

We finally come in for a landing just next to some ambulances. There are a couple scattered around here and there down the street. Or what's left of it. Ock and the Terminator groupie must have had a good time. At least none of the wreckages on fire.

He sets me down and I turn my attention back to Gwen. I'm zoning out a little here. I've flown with other heroes before but this guy isn't just _any _hero.

"You okay sweetie?"

She nods, a grin wider than the Holland tunnel on her face. And it's aimed at me, not just the big guy. That's…sort of new. Mostly me teaming up with one of the big guns, not to name names (Captain America), pushes me from Friendly Neighbourhood co star to Town In The Middle Of Nowhere sidekick. The crowd, mostly entire news teams from the ceremony, surge forward. The big guy gives me a look that says _You know how it goes _and steps in front of me and Gwen raising his hands, that same smile on his face.

He probably dosen't know I gave him a look back that said _Actually, no_.

I spot Lois holding her own in the storm. Her eyes knife from the big guy, to the wrecked street and then to me. Looking back feels like looking into a sun. He says a few words I can't make out (because I don't have super hearing), and suddenly the mob is backing up. Including Jonah. Lois has this look on her face, a sort of smile meets boredom, as if this is par for the course. Nice. I would have just run for it. Because there's crime to fight. Not because I'd be scared or anything. Oh no. Definitely not.

He's looking at me again, so I decide to get all business like.

"So what happened to Doc Ock and the Iron Man wannabe? They get away?"

I don't think he heard me almost wet myself. Which reminds me, I haven't been to the bathroom since we left the hotel. I'm going to be able to write on all the snow in Antarctica when this is over.

"Not exactly. I can track them down easily enough. Their not exactly subtle. But I had to make sure everyone was okay, they really tore up things around here. I'm glad you were on the scene, you really slowed things down."

He probably could have stopped an earthquake in China, a nuke in Russia, cured world hunger and have been back in plenty of time to take down those two psychos, but if Aunt May taught me anything, it was how to take a compliment. I get so few as it is.

I keep my hand steady as I switch off my belt light. Last thing my reputation needs is me grabbing my crotch with one hand and holding a eight year old girl in the other. In front of a crowd mostly made up of reporters. Speaking of said mass, Gwen's father bursts out towards us like a salmon out of a stream. I hold Gwen out, and he grabs her as if he were clinging to a life preserver in an ocean. Which he kind of is. Looking at him now…there's a bit of George Stacy in him, even though the features are decades younger.

"She's okay, just a little…"

"Thank you Superman, thank you so much! God bless you!"

Yeah, I'm getting that Captain America team up feeling.

At least my hands are free. Gwen waves to me over her dad's shoulder, not the big guy, me. I return it and whatever part of me decided to be petty dies down. She's safe. I've got the most forward of all back up to help take on Ock and Metallo. And I do not have God knows how much wreckage crushing down on me anymore. All in all, not bad.

_This vacation is shaping up when you think about it._

I check my web shooters while I'm at it. I caught that rarest of things, a lucky break. Neither of them damaged in the fall, and I'm still running at around full capacity. I'm getting the feeling I'm going to be using a lot of this stuff up tonight.

"I didn't know you operated out side of New York."

I shrug, trying to keep my shoulders from falling off with nervious shaking.

"One day, I'm going look around there and realise all I've done with my life is spray silvery goo all over everything. I might as well get out and spray silvery goo over stuff somewhere else."

He laughs, a sound from Christmas and thanksgiving and your birthday. Superman laughed at my joke.

I am _so_ rubbing Johnny's face in this.

He motions to my webshooters as I slide an extra cartage in.

"Your abilities…there mechanical?" 

"Nope. I can barley stop the clock blinking on my VCR." 

Okay, could I have picked a joke that's more dated? Even I, the anti Donald Trump, have a DVD player.

He smiles, no laughing but smiles. It vanishes a second after my Spider sense buzz saws it's way through my skull, which with the headache I didn't fully appreciate until now is not fun. A giant angry orange jellyfish erupts between the canyons of Metropolis, the hellfire light shrinking away and thinning into smoke. They really aren't that subtle.

He turns to me, cape shifting in the wind like an eager tiger.

"Shall we?"

I hesitate, and yet kind of don't. My thoughts are slow. I'm going to go kick ass with a legend. _The_ legend.

What the hell. My response is instant.

"That would be super."

And away we go.


	3. Nemesis

Otto Octavius is truly an ugly, _ugly _man monster thing without his glasses. That pudding bowl thing he's had going on since I first went up against him way back in 1987 just dosen't work. It'd sort of work if he wasn't so fat. The bruises don't do a lot either, and the white tux/lab coat he uses to replace the green and orange tights he used to waddle around in is stained dirty grey from the half hour or so he's been at this. I'd be tempted to say he's seen better days, but I'd be lying and with the whole superhero thing I have to tell more than I feel comfortable with.

Metallo isn't really a fair comparison when his organic body is apparently hamburger meat and he insists on the skull head look. While the silver metal shows no emotion other than that deaths head grin ( at least its not as wide as Ultron's, I could never take that seriously even after he committed one of the largest acts of genocide of the twentieth century) I think it's safe to say he's as surprised as Ock. After all, does any other super hero team enter with the one who can fly towing the other on a pair of web skis? I think not.

"Hey guys, either of you got a camera? If my lovely assistant here drops me or runs my privates into a parking meter, we'll be swimming in America's Funniest Home Video's gold!"

"Is now really the time?"

I hear the smile through the baritone.

"It's all about the look on their faces."

"Fair enough."

He starts to slow, so I take that as my cue. I let go of the anchoring webline, back flipping onto the top of an SUV (there's a ridiculously cute Garfield 'Baby on board' sticker plastered on it that would depress the hell out of me if I wasn't in a state of such absolute fear that an episode of Sienfeild would have me laughing like a hysterical lunatic).

Octavius and Corbin, having reduced about half the surrounding area into a more sanitary version of the Jersey turnpike, were facing each other down like charging bulls before me and the big guy showed up. In hindsight we probably could have let them clobber each other and saved ourselves the trouble. But where's the fun in that?

"Corben." The big guy rumbles, "Dr Octavius. I'm going to ask once. The streets will be full of SCU units in mere minutes." He goes on in that voice, not the calm baritone that sounds like Sunday church and mom's apple pie but not a threatening Daredevil _Put the gun down or I'll shatter every bone in you're little rat ass _style growl. I realize he's actually trying to reason with them.

"You're a smart man doctor. Do the math. You're on unfamiliar turf, your still bleeding from where Metallo tried to cut you're head open with your own metallic arms, and I haven't even thought about touching my JLA signal device and I already have all the help I'll need to get you off these streets."

Oh.

Wow.

Take that Justice League! Although come to think of it, I have been a Reserve Avenger for an awfully long time…

"You are right alien…"

There's a venomous hiss in Octavius' voice that almost matches the mad metallic sound of his tentacles gearing up.

"…I am an intelligent man."

And then he does the most stupid thing I've ever seen anyone do. He strikes the big guy head on with all four arms. There's a sound like two diamonds scraping off each other, and the big guy moves back about an inch.

The look on Ock's face when he realizes that was so he could back up to get a firmer grip on all four limbs rather than the impact is one that I shall forever return to once I make a copy from my camera. Which is out of harms way on a building ledge zoomed in on us. At first I didn't think Supes would actually agree to my proposal to hang back and whip up the web skis (hey, it freaks out Ock, and gives me the excuse to secure the thing while his back is turned) but he actually went for it. Okay, so this means I get shots of us gliding in from the back. But it also means I get the perfect money shot of Octavius getting that unbelievably overweight ball he calls an ass handed to him by the most powerful being on and off the planet.

I think I'll get it framed. Maybe I'll make a set. See, the big guy picks Ock up by all four arms, and flexes, sending a wave of motion up the things like the world's weirdest looking slinky. Then, as the doctor vibrates on the other end like a tuning fork made out of lard, he slams him into the ground with another flex. One, two, three, just like that. Yeah, I think I'll get 'em all framed. It's a thing of beauty really.

There's a kind of smell, like ozone and burning rubber, underlined with a faint hum. Not my Spider Sense, which _is_ going off. Like a generator starting up. Charging. For a shot.

The words "Look out!" are out of my mouth a second after I've fired a web line at Metallo's foot, tugging with enough force to uproot a Canadian redwood. The night goes green for a split second as a blast of pure Kryptonite radiation roars out of his chest, making him look like some sort of God awful star in the after glow. A God awful star I just tipped on his ass. To save the greatest hero the universe has ever known.

Eat it Midtown High chess club! You too New York Driving Academy! I can _too _make split second decisions on the fly!

Okay we seem to have done the whole Trade Your Rouges Gallery Like Trading Cards thing so I figure I'll actually try and make myself useful, leaping up and twisting as I go, firing almost as much webbing as I have in the shooters straight down at him and hoping it'll be enough to keep him pinned to the road like a squirrel on an interstate highway. For good measure (and because I know this stuff stops and starts like a guy going to the bathroom in the morning when it comes to actually working on these morons) I ram both feet down into his skull face…feeling them go numb as it vanishes into the tarmac.

"You stinking…!"

"What, did I forget to wash my booties?"

He may have a point. I mean, I run across rooftops in these things. They don't really have soles because anything too thick wouldn't allow me to get a grip on a surface. You would not believe what people leave on rooftops. Seriously. You would not. After patrolling through Yancy Street…yeesh. Taking them off after getting home is like a dam bursting in your nose. Wouldn't Daredevil or Wolverine say something? Well, Matt's nose is insanely intense. I'm pretty sure he'd say something. But Wolverine isn't that subtle, and Matt's a polite guy when he dosen't have to break his cane over someone's head. But Wolverine smokes those stinky cigars, how can he smell anything at all? Then again I don't know the difference in intensity between Wolverine and Daredevil's noses. Do my feet stick so much they could rust the tin man from hell? He doesn't have a nose, how would he know? Ah, screw what he thinks. He's crazy.

Crazy strong. He does that whole "Angry Noise!" thing guys like the Hulk and the Juggernaut do when they want to really smash stuff, pulling the ground he's webbed to up with him, sending shrapnel bouncing in every direction except the one I'm loitering in as he snaps the stuff open.

His feet make a tap-dancing click as they smash the ground underneath him, shooting forward like a bullet out of a gun. Actually not so much, because I've dodged plenty with hardly any blood in my body and missing five weeks of sleep. This is a Rhino kind of charge. Rhino with a jet up his ass. Never dodged one of those before. Won't find out if I can today because Metallo vanishes into a cloud of dust that erupts further down the street. Maybe I saw a flash of red and blue seconds before, but for the first time since Uncle Ben hired that magician to show up at my sixth birthday party, I don't go trying to solve the magic. Under the booming sounds I hear something. A familiar metallic sound behind me, but I don't turn around.

"Hey Doc."

"You really think he'll make a difference? The alien? He won't. No one will once I have that Kryptonite, once I master the atom. No one! Especially not you!"

"You mind? In the middle of watching street theatre here."

There are several things I love about planet Earth. One is Aunt May. Another is Mary Jane. Yet another is Aunt May's patented wheat cakes. Just below that, right between Venom getting a life and leaving me alone and Norman Osborne getting arrested for tax evasion, is that high pitched little angry pig noise Doc Ock makes when he's really angry. The incredible Hulk, he ain't.

Spider Sense flashes and I'm perched on a street lamp before his arms eviscerate where I was standing. Barely.

"Don't blink!"

I go for broke, pulling out the old _Web the eyes _trick. Must be the oldest trick in my short book of cheap shots, right in front of _Leap all over the enemy punching them so they can't punch me_. I honestly would never count on this to do anything if it hadn't worked back when I was still new to the game and facing off with Ock for the second time, his arms around my waist trying to crush me like an organic soda can, and his face just open enough for me to fire off a clear shot of web in pure desperation.

It's worked on and off ever since. Now is the latter, one of those tentacles slashing across the air in front of his face and getting snagged in my web line. Ock's a fast learner. So am I. I put all my weight into my arms, reeling the thing back before it can yank me off my perch, while pushing down with my feet to get a stronger grip on it, trying to play the immovable object. And then let go.

I bounce off his face (smacking him in the nose is the most satisfying thing I, as a crime fighter/hot blooded American male living in a democracy which promotes the freedom of God's green earth to all men, can experience) and tumble into a crouch right in front of him before leaping forward. Got to make my mind up, shot to the chest or kick to the crotch.

I don't get the chance, Spider Sense going off just a second too late for me to realize I'm not moving fast enough to be completely out of Ock's arm range…

He must be mad, the impact sends me down the street like a crash test dummy. If I was like Iron Fist or Shang Chi or any of those fancy pants martial artists I'd roll with it or something, but I'm not, so I don't. I do manage to ram my hand down into the ground with enough force to push me right side up, snagging another street light as I go. I spin around it, building momentum, then let go mid Spider Sense blast, hurtling forward just as he smashes the spot where I was spinning.

"Eight ball, corner pocket!"

He tries to pull the arms back in, but I snap both legs out to knock the two that are there out of the way, flipping back over to hold both my fist together. Angle a little so I ram him with my shoulder at about 40 miles per hour, then swing them both into the side of that mass of carved fat he calls his right ear while he's still reeling. For good measure, suction both hands onto his chest as we tumble down (that sounds far more disgusting than I could ever mean it to) so my weight is still pushing him down as we land. Nothing like a couple of shots to the other guys ribs to keep him from breaking yours.

"You can take the spider out of New York, but you can't take the New Yorker out of the spider. That, my friend, was how they say hello in Hell's Kitchen!"

Thanks Matt.

For nothing. Sidewalk shatters as I dodge one tentacle only to have another say goodbye in the Bronx to my spine. I leave a nice ass shaped dent in a car door. I'm not there to admire my handy work too long, and the hood takes the Ock shot meant for me, leaving one of those grooves that can only come from a pile of adamantaium metal backed up by the raging will power of a forty seven year old fat guy. Technically in eBay terms I think that means we both autographed it.

Two options here; (A) web his pants and pull them down to solve that great riddle of the ages _Is Ock a briefs or boxers guy? _or (B) listen to my Spider Sense and duck the street light lance coming at us Hawkeye style?

I go with (B), and get to watch the kinda but not really too satisfying sight of Ock getting pelted with about half of the Metropolis free way through cracked car window. See , I'm fast enough to vault over the roof and behind the right hand side of the thing before this stuff hits, whether its coming from the big guy or Metallo I don't know. Neither does Ock and he clearly can't.

He can see my enjoying a pounding at his expense however. The arms come from all sides. I dodge two thanks to my Spider Sense, but one snags me by the spider emblem, another by the ankle. It's a painful ride through the car to come face to face with the worst case of adult acne on the planet. I'd say something, but I may have a concussion right on top of my funny bone…thingy.

This isn't the first time I've been in this position, clamped in the grip of something that could tare a sheet of titanium and make ten different kinds of origami shapes out of it. Eleven if said something is particularly dainty. Fortunately every kind of freak show I've gone up against dosen't have the brain cells to count the lack of brain cells that prevents them from doing that. But all Scorpion or Ox or Dragon Man or Wrecker have to do once they get a grip on me (which is more difficult than managing to stretch your muscles down the back of the couch to pick up the remote) is close their eyes, concentrate their hardest, tear me down the middle, muscle, tissue, organs, bones and all, and make a whish.

Now look at Octavius. Four metallic arms with a reach of about twenty four feet and more flexible than the standards of a fraternity college girl, meaning he could technically rape me while rearranging my spine into a tuning fork. And does he, a man who supposedly graduated from Harvard (I'm not entirely sure that's accurate. I think I'd be freaked out if he went to ESU. Or Midtown High for that matter. Eew.) do this? No.

He throws me.

He throws me ass first into a moving van, so in his defence there's room to achieve the same effect.

"Ungh, ouch, argh, crap, gah, oh jeez…!"

Did you know Metropolis tarmac tastes different from New York tarmac? Because it does. I may actually vomit now to symbolize my homesickness. That and it feels like my kidney and my pancreas are trying to get hitched in my lower intestine. And now those little burning waves on my ass, which can only be bruises, start itching.

"Ow."

I recognise the click right next my head immediately. Can't be a superhero and not recognise the sound of a cocking gun.

Did that sound weird to anyone else or is it just how messed up my head is after the Ock express?

"Stand up slowly with yer mandibles behind yer head, bug boy."

Mandibles? Gross. And who the hell uses "Yer" in a sentence? Only Ben Grim has any sort of official, if not God given, right to use of that word because he's awesome. Okay, Wolverine, Absorbing Man, all of the Wrecking Crew except maybe Thunderball, Rhino, Scorpion, Bullseye and a bunch of other guys I've fought with (including Wolverine) talk like that, but one's Canadian so its better than "Eh" and the other's have a pre school education.

This guy probably shares that (not the Canadian thing) because you _do not _point a gun at a guy with the proportionate…oh wait I'm from out of town. He dosen't know the speal. Ah screw it…

I go ten stories just for show, triple patented Spidey style summersault with an extra bend to my spine to show I don't need no stinking mandibles, snagging the gun from his hand with a web line as I go. I land behind him and idly remove the magazine the way Matt taught me once by accident, tossing the empty lump of metal to him to top it off. Total time elapsed…ten seconds since the full stop of his last sentence. And that's because I came back down slowly.

"Nice tour guide etiquette, really getting a feel for native hospitality over here. Next time I'll jab a fork in my eye and get Lex Luthor to sign it. That'll be better than t-shirts for all my friends. Say, you don't happen to have any silver ware on you right now, huh?"

"I got yer silver ware right here buddy boy!"

Oh good Lord…

I get a better look at him as he swings at me, a right hook so old fashioned there may actually be baby dinosaurs growing on it. Fat in kind of a miny Wilson Fisk way, balding, wearing one of those Dum Dum Dugan style hats and a face that's honest to God the same colour as Jameson's when I suggest that ,hey, maybe these photos of me getting my ass handed to my by the Frightful Four And A Half are worth more than half a dish washer's salary.

His fist has that bare knuckle street fighter look, areas of raw pink blended perfectly into Caucasian skin colour. His clenched jaw curls up slightly, not smiling or anything, but like a giant cigar should be stashed there. One probably was until he decided to go pointing guns at people.

"I give you a five for the hat, a ten for spunk, but zero for style. For future reference it goes like _this_…"

In the past couple of hours I've had jet lag, train cramp, arrived at a party just in time to miss all the good food, had a building dropped on me by a rabid cyborg, and thrown at stuff by a fat guy with a bad hair cut and a sea food fetish. Forgive me if I put a little extra sparkle into cleaning this guys clock. He goes down backwards, head coming to rest at the foot of the van responsible for my twanging ass.

"Overall, nice form but don't call us, we'll call…"

Then I spot the letters printed big and bold for morons on the side of the van.

SCU.

Oh crap.

New York started up things like Damage Control and Code Blue back around the mid nineties when just about all of meta humanity had set up shop somewhere around the city. About half of Gotham's tax dollars supposedly go into funding Anti Arkham Asylum Escapee divisions, to little success. Central and Keystone City compare notes on how to deal with any and all Rouges other than letting really, really fast guys do all the work. Its become standard in many centres of vigilante (superhuman or otherwise) activity to actually have people to _deal _with it all, or at least give the police chiefs someone to yell at when they get yelled at by the mayor because the voters are yelling at him. Metropolis has the Special Crimes Unit , one of the best and long lasting in the business.

And I just punched out one of their officers.

Spider Sense. Another click.

"Back away, and on the ground. Now."

Female. Voice hard as titanium reinforced nails. Calm. Like Captain America before he kicks some terrorist ass. Meaning she's pissed. And probably armed with a big gun. Nice.

Jean DeWolf used to talk like that.

"Would it help if I said that I am not of this world and on my planet knocking people unconscious is a form of marriage proposal?"

"No."

"Good, because it's not."

DeWolf wouldn't have bought that either. I turn slowly to see down the barrel of the nice big gun the woman behind me has pointed at my skull. Really big. Doubt Metallo would care. I on the other hand…

"Uh, I'm with Superman?"

Cocked eye brow. She's probably sceptical because that's how you survive as someone who goes toe to toe with guys in masks everyday. I don't like it but I understand it. Me and the NYPD never quite developed the greatest working relationship. Probably not going to happen here unless the big guy vouches for me, but seeing as how I just smacked down one of her men it can't hurt to try and make better impression. Other than the one I left on her windscreen.

"Octavius and you aren't in the same crowd?"

"Nope."

"Media says different."

Okay, low blow. She probably dislikes us "Glory seeking vigilantes" about as much as she hates the typical tabloid vultures like those guys over at the Daily Globe (like holier than thou Eddie Brock never broke up a celebrity marriage), but still a low blow.

"This from a cop. Bugle reader?"

The gun stays on my chest There's a groan behind me, muffled cursing.

"Now and then."

Oh joy.

"Then you can read all about me and Superman taking on the nasty cyborg."

Snarky. Not the best way to go…but her expression falters. Fast as a lightning flash, but I saw it. Best thing about this mask: it may be hot, it may stick to my face when I'm sweaty in the summer, it may have itched and caught in my mouth the first time I tried it on, I may have actually thrown up in it during some of my worst fights, but its still full face. The ultimate poker face in red and black with big freaky eyes. Her guns still on me though, eyes to. But she's focusing on something behind me.

"You okay Dan?"

"Oh I'm gonna be…"

I jump over his tackle, twisting out of the way of the round the blonde fires at me half way up. I find myself surrounded as I land. Guys in kevlar and high tech looking SWAT gear. The entire S.C.U. I should be flattered, except I'm not.This is getting stupid. Okay, she's a Bugle reader but come on, I was just towed in on a pair of web skies by the personification of Truth and Justice. The big guy's blatantly here for Metallo, how can I not be here for Ock?

Where is Ock anyway?

Spider Sense. Shadow falling over blonde, Dan and me. He's about ten miles down the street, tossing SUVs at us. A grand total of three to be exact. A familiar Garfield sticker smiles out at me from behind a looming windscreen like Death decided to get all pleasant and offer me a crumpet before sending me off to wherever I'm about to go. He (or she rather) is going to be disappointed.

The S.C.U squad has scattered (something about assuming "crash positions") except for the two anti New Yorkers. Blonde'll be easy if I can ditch the excess weight of her gun, it's her partner and his gut that's going to be the problem. There's only so much you can do with Spider Strenght. Fear and a tendency to try and prevent any and all people in the general vicinity being crushed by cars helps. Great power don't fail me now.

A flex of my fancy feet to get them working and I'm moving. Snag Baldy by the vest with my right hand, scoop Blonde up in my right arm and sprint. Crouch, and …jump! A wall of metal and spinning rubber hurtles underneath us, another booming overhead. I duck a little to avoid a wheel that's suddenly the size of Namor's ego, pulling Baldy in closer so his hand dosen't get pulverized by an oncoming door mirror. I ram my feet off a street lamp to slow us down, leaving me with less impact to disburse as we finally hit street level again.

Spider Sense again and I throw them clear. I'd move to avoid the arm that smacks me into the rear of the still vibrating SUV but I'm not that big on multitasking. Also I may be a masochist; I don't know why but does this entire night sound like the sort of night a guy married to a supermodel should be having? Then there's the spandex, and to the big guy's credit that outfit is cool and all but kinda…yeah.

But then again people who say that probably haven't seen it up close. After being saved from certain death.

Speaking of which that throw upy feeling is back. I've had this a bunch of times over my career, last time was either from a gas bomb from the Taskmaster, gut punch from Venom, that one time Ock and the Sinister Six (and Hobgoblin. Sorry, the Goblins just never featured in my idea of the Six at all. Even that ugly Ghostbusters/Jim Henson thing Jason McNidale mutated into) got together with a bunch of Hydra hardware and that poor retarded Godzilla movie rip off Gog and almost blew The Fantastic Four, Deathlock, the Hulk, Ghost Rider, Solo, Nova and little old me (I think Sleepwalker was there two for about five seconds) to Hell along with most of New York.

"These fools can't help you arachnid! Nothing will, especially not the alien!"

"Well listen to little miss sunshine…"

Seems Otto's secure in _his_ masculinity. It's not often he resorts to actually using his flesh and blood arms to try and strangle me, manly spittle splashing off my mask lenses. Uh… wow, yeah, his hands are stronger than you'd think. Not muscle, but his fat swells up around my Adam's apple and tires to force it out my mouth. That dosen't sound nice because its not, and I don't want to actually see what my Adam's apple looks like. Super strenght and adrenaline wind up in the weirdest places, in my case my right knee and both feet after I've jerked it into Octavius' gut. The force of my feet sends him hurtling into a street light and down the street. Two arms ram into the road, catching him and not stopping this whole stupid thing by him getting KO'd off the tarmac. He's couching like hell though, so I'll take what victory I can get until he goes down.

A series of clicks like metal twigs snapping echo from amongst the wreckage. The glint of Sawyer's weapon dances off my mask lenses with a strangely grim speckled glint of beauty. It dosen't blind me to what might happen here as her fellow officers follow her lead. What will happen if I don't open my mouth.

No problem.

"No good. His arms are too fast. He'll stay on the move, block 'em, maybe even use the ricochet against you. You won't get any further with tear gas either. Instant whirlwind."

Sawyer bites her lip (wonder if she does that a lot), glances over the top of the truck. A SCU officer hurtles over head, crash helmet the only thing between him and shards of bone through the brain.

"I know him. Let me go."

"You were going to do it anyway, right?"

"Yeah. Just thought I'd ask first."

I take off in a flat out run, head bowed towards Octavius. Normally this kind of thing would guarantee me not having a head anymore and the doctor having a shiny new human skull ash tray. But Ock's still groggy, hunched over and down to wheezing, arms curled inward, possibly protectively. I change to a zigzag with added cartwheels and summersaults keeping him guessing. I'm almost close enough to see those bulbous fish eyes under the lab worker sunglasses: which ways he coming from, which ways he coming from? Hit the spida-a-a, wina prize!

I figure an octopus is worth a pretty good twenty.

I score ten with a right hook, another ten with a left jab. The sudden spasm of metal all around me send me off my feet, but I turn it into a flip, managing to fire off a snap kick to that upside down Tiramisu dish that is his skull before I land. After that it's cat and mouse down the street and away from the SCU.

I hear the metallic slithering of his tentacles as he follows me, Spider Sense ringing at either that or the far off sound of gun fire trailing behind us. I don't know if they're shooting at me or him, but we're moving too fast for it to be much of a problem.

"Enjoying the view?" I shake my ass a little, just to get the point across. Hey, I have a nice ass and sometimes I need to feel good about myself. Deal with it.

Ock dosen't. Roaring, he grabs me by the throat from behind, sends me reeling back, then throws me like a primary colored football into the side of an abandoned taxi, the impact tipping it over so I get out of the remains and hit a fire hydrant ass first.

"My ass…my beautiful ass…"

"Die!"

He's looming over me in seconds. It takes me less to nail his glasses with a double barrel web shot. It actually sends him tottering (I never really had occasion to use that word before) backwards, arms dragging along the asphalt as they struggle to find purchase. He actually manages to get it off before I land a haymaker so powerful I almost dislocate my arm. I may have unintentionally broken his jaw, but that's not a bad thing.

(1) He's out.

(2) For a guy who hates how much I use my mouth, he hasn't worn out his telling me that yet.

I spread my arms wide as Turpin arrives, tailed by some straggling S.C.U troops and their now unnecessary guns.

"Ta-Da!"

He tips back the brim of his hat a little, looking down at Octavius face, propped upright by the fact he's lying on his stomach, sprawled in a kind of sideways position, arms limp. He lost his glasses after I tagged him, but while his eyes are closed his mouth is open and he may be drooling a little.

"Ya did good bug man."

"Arachnid."

"Say what?"

I shrug.

"Sorry, I sneezed. So is this the usual night for you guys?"

He grins, swivelling his cigar to the other side of his mouth.

"Yep."

A trail of apartment blocks miles away on the horizon buckle, dust and smoke rolling out across the distant streets, the boom audible even from over here. Turpin's grin vanishes as we both turn to follow the streaking trail of blue headed for the trembling buildings.

"That too?"

"Yep."

"Then show me the ropes…if you can keep up."

I leap, swinging in a way that dosen't quite favour my right arm. Maybe I did dislocate it a little. Stop building falling over, kiss boo boo later. Below I hear the sounds of sirens, but I'm outdistancing them already, and with a guy like Corbin this fight is sure to move away from here and maybe further into the city. Wonder how many units they can actually spare for this kind of thing. It's too much to hope the big guy already put him down.

I'm guessing no such luck as I swing low to grab one guy before he gets crushed by a flying piece of rubble, dumping him into a fleeing crowd of people before hauling on the line to gain some altitude and reach the shattered corner of one building. The big guy squats in the middle of it, straightening up to push a decapitated support beam back into place as he goes. I fire a mass of webbing around it to get his hands free, which will help these people a hell of lot more than me and the show biz gimmick I designed in my room at fifteen.

Maybe he nods at me, maybe he dosen't. I don't have much time to think about it as the top floor goes up in flames, the two of us heading towards it as fast as we can. I get there first, jumping through an open window, for all the good it does. Smoke everywhere, all around, in my mask, up my nose. Light dances darkly and brightly off my mask lenses, making it even harder to see anything. The confined roaring is deafening. This is why I hate fires. The big guy dosen't seem to have the same problem, glaring at the fire, _into_ it, as if it flipped him off on the freeway.

"There's people in the apartments next door!"

"I got 'em!"

Gotta love that X ray vision. But I figure there's another power that might work better.

I turn to him in mid sprint, veering left at the buzzing of my Spider Sense to dodge a collapsing section of ceiling.

"After I get them clear, can you blow this thing out?"

He nods, rubble pounding off his shoulders like cascading snow.

"I'm going to spread it among each building, but I need to make sure enough people are out and far enough away! I might put it out but there'll be a lot of glass and a lot weakened structure!"

Man knows his limits. Speaking of which…

I hold off on my two questions until I'm heaving the mother and son out of the remains of their apartment.

"Anyone else in the building?"

"No!

"Great! What happened to Metallo?"

The smile on his face isn't all that nice.

"Tied up and waiting for the S.C.U in the sewers!"

Probably wrapped up in crushed pipes. Crushed _sewer_ pipes. Nasty. I like it. We're out in the clear air now, me rappelling down the side of the building on a web, two passengers cradled in my other arm. The big guy's shoulders tense far over head once we're a the twelfth floor, swelling, a big cartoon breath. There's nothing cartoony about the blast of arctic cold that rams into the fire, crushing it like a cockroach under an ice giant's foot. I see what he meant about holding back. Some of the brickwork and windows cave inward, hurtling into the dying blaze as they ice over. Frozen glass and brick moving at what looks like a hundred and twenty miles an hour, smashing through mortar, plumbing and various appliances…yeah, I can kinda see why he'd hold out on that. We spend the next half hour pulling the same stunts on the other buildings, the big guy lending a hand when there are too many for me to sling out on my own. The rescue crews and the S.C.U catch up, doing crowd control and tending to the lower floors. It goes pretty well, we actually manage to get half way through a third building, but I have this feeling…it'd not jus the fire. But no one's died yet. That's just it, a good thing, but a little too good. Like something's just waiting to go wrong.

But I'm in a building on fire, that's a given.

I turn away from webbing up two tenth floor support beams, putting my shoulder into a door giving a fire fighter and an S.C.U trooper a hard time. I almost collapse into the flaming room as it shatters out of the frame, one hinge spinning into nothing inside the inferno. A family of four crouch in front of the blaze, the mother hunched over the boy and girl as the father presses down on the trigger of a fire extinguisher as far as it will go, foam hurtling into what was their kitchen. I bat a smoking couch away to the far right, giving the professionals enough room to grab the family back to a safer distance. The S.C.U guy actually has to put a handful of shots into the exposed workings of the kitchen sink, sending a blast of water over the entire thing, to get the guy to back off, but not drop the extinguisher. They may need it later. The family gives me this weird look as we back out into the hallway, and it's only then I realise how terrifying my costume must be in this light, orange and dark red with burning silver eyes. I can kind of relate, I'm starting to feel like I'm covered in cooking oil inside this thing.

I veer off to the right as the party is shunted towards the stair well just ahead of the support beams I webbed up. Out there, there's a hole in the wall leading to another, lower series of roofs and a rescue team with a ladder, blankets and plenty of ambulances and other safe people waiting for them. Holding the support beams in place gives them a two hour window, more than enough time and that's the last batch of people the big guy saw on this floor. The fire fighter looks at me as he covers the evacuation.

"Hey, you coming?"

"Just gonna check! Couple of apartments we haven't hit yet!"

He looks like he's weighing his options of either getting the family to safety or make sure the idiot in the mask dosen't get himself killed. The family wins. Like I said, the big guy okayed this floor, but it can't hurt to check. It's getting pretty intense up here, although actual apartments are few since this seems to be more a showroom, or corridor or whatever. Anyway, someone could have gotten in trouble around here, and with the fire picking up like this I won't feel right until I _know_ it's clear.

Light dances madly on the other side of a man sized crack weaving opposite the next apartment door. A low creaking noises echoes out of it, like someone screaming in slow motion. I leap through the gap in the wall, landing in some kind of court like room. Must be the building council's meeting place. Pretty. Shame it's on fire.

"Hello?"

That noise didn't sound like anything human, but creaking rubble could mean an unconscious person trapped underneath, fighting to get out before the rest of the building pours itself down there throat. Still, 'Hello?' sounds like something one of those idiots in a slasher movie does right before the evil hockey mask chainsaw wielder of doom jumps on screen and shouts 'Boo!'. Not a good move for someone reapplying for a physics degree.

"Anyone in here?"

I should probably just strap on a pair of tight jeans and a tighter white shirt to show off my assets and get blood all over. The smoke and flames are too thick to make out much of what's in front of me except city lights through the far side window, if anyone is in here…I don't know. But letting me know would be nice.

My Spider Sense erupts as that sound rolls through the room again, my feet automatically gripping the floor tightly as the carpet sags inward, floorboards snapping underneath it. I'm shaken so much by this, I barely have time to register the metallic shape that bursts out of the floor like angry metal lava out of a fuzzy volcano, clamping a hand around my neck so the shout (not scream!) gurgles half way out of my mouth. I think there's drool on the inside of my mask now. I instantly regret coming up with the idea of Check Every Room In The Flaming Building And Make Sure To Go To The One Room The Angry Killer Cyborg Is Hiding Out In.

Yeah, total blonde moment. Ben (the brother, not the uncle) would be ashamed of me.

"Inseeeeeeect…!" Metallo half snarls, ending in a shout. I'd do the whole correct him bit, but there's the hand thing and I'm too busy panicking anyway. The bright green of those metal eye balls is painful against the dark light of the fire, Metallo pulling me in so close I can see the scratches and chips running across his face. The light glints of some kind of residue lathered all over him and I realise it's either dust or water. There's definitely grime there to. The guy must have _climbed_ his way up here, straight from the sewers.

This close I can smell something almost more chocking than the lump of metal around my throat, the smell of cooking urine.

Eew.

Surreally, the sense memory comes back to me instantly: one time me and Johnny were hunting down poor Curt Connors through the NY sewer system. He made a break for the water which meant we'd have no chance of catching him, so Johnny did the first thing that came to mind. He fried the water at a temperature of about eighty eight Celsius. Not boiling point, if the guy didn't take the hint and back off the last thing the Torch wanted to do was kill him, but the stench...took me years of web swinging in (relatively) fresh New York air to forget it.

The memory is _not_ the one I want to be having in my final moments, so the best way to avoid that is to make sure this is _not_ my final moment. My hands break the grip on Metallo's, spraying almost all of what's left of both shooters all over that green eyed skull. The gambit pays off; he may have spent the last couple of years as a walking tank, but he's still got human instincts. My ass bounces off the floor as I'm unceremoniously dropped, Metallo staggering back and clawing at his face liked an enraged dog. I hear muffled metallic squawks under the layers and decided not to waist the two seconds it's going to take him pull it off.

Coffee tables are wonderful things. Get enough momentum behind them and you can do anything, like, oh I dunno, smash an psychotic robot man through a tenth story window.

The death throws of the building boom around me, a chill strong as Bobby Drake's rushing through the walls and bending the flames like flailing palm trees. The sound of the lower floors giving out dosen't assure me it's enough, and being an ice statue in an earthquake dosen't sound like the May Parker's favourite nephew wants to go out. This, I take my leave, diving out through the shattered window and onto the roof below. No sign of Metallo, but who says he landed here? I don't have much time to care as the building caves in behind me, the blast of air and force throwing me down into the street. A last web line from my left shooter snaps my body into more controlled fall, chunks of mortar half frozen, half burnt scything over my head as I land in a crouch in front of the crowd, seconds away from their home landing on them. My first thoughts are to spin a web net, that I couldn't make one big enough to catch it all, there's nothing to anchor it too if I could, it would never get wide enough in time, and that I'm practically out anyway. My head goes empty, filming like my camera back on that ledge a few blocks away as my view of a slab of building about the size of Giant Man (or Yellow Jacket, or Ant Man or what ever he's calling himself), window frames laced with jagged glass and a length of fire escape banging against it as it hangs from a single bolt, is blocked by an instant mountain of red and blue.

The movie actor black haired head rears back like an inhaling dragon (question, how

many cigarettes could Fing Fang Foom smoke if Fing Fang Foom could smoke cigarettes?), and suddenly there's this red screaming, pulsing light obliterating everything. My coustume is going to be all wrinkled and stinky from the sweat and the heat. _After _I've just been through three burning buildings. Heat vision. The physicist in me insists it shouldn't be red, but my endorphins, happy to be in a living body still producing adrenaline to be happy in, decided to go nuts and drown it out.

The big guy lands to the cheering of about a thousand people, looking the building up and down. I do the same and I have to admit, apart from the pile of rubble piled around the still standing supports and the gaping hole that was the first two floors it dosen't look too bad. Pull in a construction crew, ring up the insurance agencies…hopefully this'll all somehow pull people's lives back together. I've seen worlds torn apart by this kind of thing back home, stuff that could have been prevented if half these villains weren't such destructive bastards. And we were just a split second faster to stop it before it happened. But their alive. That's something. Maybe more.

He big guy looks over his shoulder, smiling at the crowd, turning fully to face me and the rescue crews.

"Nice work."

There's a chorus of thanks and more cheers over my "Back at ya.", the men swarming forward to shake hands, pat on the back, and generally do what you naturally would face to face with the biggest name since Jesus H Christ himself. Hell, there's even a couple for me. Apparently I'm not bad for a tourist". I'm grinning under the mask like that crazy SOB in Gotham, Turpin's arm around hanging off my shoulder, nodding at a thinly smiling Sawyer as a black SUV pulls up alongside a parked ambulance. Instead of the FBI (or worse, the IRS), Lois leaps out before the doors half way close to open, a bomber jacket thrown on over her cocktail dress, sensible shoe heels almost snapping off as she lands on the asphalt. Olsen follows in a kind of gravity defying tumble, dancing along behind her with a grin almost as shiny as the light glinting off his camera lens. Ben is next, following them with a slow jog and a raised eye brow. This is big but not really his kind of thing. He and Matt are crime buster/mystery solver types, and to be fair hero team ups are kinda so and so. But he's smiling. Not in that typical _Riiiigth _New Yorker kinda way though. After all, it _is_ Superman. He gives me a nod, the kind he gives me back at the Bugle when I come in a seven to find out he's been at his desk since one last morning. Only to Spider-Man, who he's sometimes met through Daredevil. Not Peter Parker. Not at all.

I don't even have to turn around at the sound behind me like Godzilla on a bad day, but I do anyway. There's Jonah, haggling over price with the owner. That's oddly comforting considering I'm standing in what's technically a war zone.

What happened to Metallo?

"Hey, uh…y'know how you said you tied Metallo up down in the sewers?" I try and keep the shake out of my voice. Mainly because I'm admitting to screwing up to a god here. He looks at me with both of those Pierce Broasnan eye brows furrowed.

"Yes?"

"I kinda had a run in with him back there. In the building. He must have tunnelled his way back out but he wasn't in there when it came down. So he's kinda…loose. Yeah. Kinda."

He glares, but not at me. At the ground. _Through_ it.

"He wasn't in the building? Did he fall out?"

"Yeah, I knocked him out a window. He must have hit the lower roof…"

Which is mostly buried under collapsed apartment block. Panic jolts something loose in my memory the sudden victory buried. But I didn't _see_ him on that roof.

"Which roof?"

"That one there…"

I point. I may as well say 'He had brown hair and was Caucasian." Turpin swears, Sawyer barking at trooper and civilian alike to back up. I hear Jameson yelling back at her, but I can't make out what their saying.

"Can't see him…" the big guy mumbles. "Luthor property…perfect."

There's something about the way he says that, don't know what, but his powers don't seem to be working here. He can't find Corbin with them, and if he's in one piece and out here…we have to get these people out of here…

In those frozen seconds of realization another one rams into me, the world around me creaking into ice solid stillness. Subconsciously I realise this is the height of my Spider Sense, hyper time at one million sensory light years every half second, waves and spikes of pheromones and radio waves peeling back the world one lair at a time. Everything it finds rushing back to my conscious mind as a compiled stream of data balling up in my brain and bouncing from lobe to lobe in the time it takes to blink an eye. Something not any other kind of sense is rushing around us in a rough semi circle, most of the crowd on the outer perimeter, me and the big guy in the centre. Metal creaks. Everything metal creaks. The SUV Jameson's standing in starts to shake.

The I can see by big guy's face that he knows what this is, and that it ain't good.

"Everybody…"

The entire area comes alive. I've only had to use that expression a few times in my life. Mostly around the symbioses and Aunt May, but this time I really mean it. For starters, the SUV caves inward at the same time it tares itself apart, chucking JJJ and the driver out like recycled take out in a hangover. Parking meters, cars, I-beams, I think maybe even one guy's braces, all moving, twisting, streaking and pulling towards me and the big guy, people scattering in their wake. No…not towards us. They hurtle pas us in a bee swarm storm cloud of engine parts and torn shrapnel, screaming together like loose change jangling in God's pocket.

A mutilated frame, more green glow than skeletal metal, erupts from the rubble of the previous building, a bulky thing like shape slamming together in the middle of the storm as it tumbles into it. The skull head thrusts out from between a pair of silver engine shoulders, a green kryptonite glow flashing behind a grate and not quite dying before more metal weaves over it like screeching knitting.

Metallo now looks like the bastard child of Iron Man's suit and the worst Transformers toy ever made.

And he's coming right at us.


	4. Victory

There are villains you almost look forward to fighting, because they take you back to the happy days of super hero ignorance when you thought, yeah, being trapped under a ton of rubble fighting for air to grab an isotope that might save a loved one from radiation poisoning induced by your blood as your archnemesis' base floods and crumbles around you _was_ the worst it was going to get. Seriously. Venom's got nothing on that.

Then there are villains who make everything into a Michael Bay movie. Not in the cosmic sense like Galactus or Thanos, although they count on the scale of the high and mighty cosmic smucks. I'm talking guys like the Juggernaut, Magneto, Graviton, or Electro after he got that insane power up. Seriously, you know you're desperate to take a guy down when you're dressed in about six layers of dark red and blue rubber insulation and calling in a mutant you've known for about the better part of a month to help take him down. Speaking of which I should probably write Nate sometime, see if he's not to busy playing X Man to get a beer (in a world of about a hundred who aren't Wolverine, running with Magneto or dead, calling yourself X Man singular when not actually a member of the three or so teams running around now probably wasn't a good idea).

Metallo seems to be one of those villains. Stuff flips over when he brushes against it, asphalt cracks under his foot and smoke, dust and flames pour down around him as rubble dances off his shoulders with a constant plink plink sound I'm surprised I can hear over everything else. Oh, and he's a roarer to. Not a Hulk roarer, just one of those angry guys who need loud noises to show they're angry.

The big guy braces as I tense, springing up, into and over the path of the psycho's charge. In the freeze frame of hang time I watch an intricate ballet of movement as iron hard muscle meets muscle hard iron, flexing like shattering rock, locking together like earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, whirlpools, typhoons, black holes and exploding supernovas meeting in that one second long space.

It breaks as I fire two web lines, the last two bursts of my one still full shooter and pried apart by both hands, at each of Metallo's shoulders, pulling them with me with muscle and gravity as the big guy pushes. I've been toying with the idea of using Ben Reilly's old impact webbing, his stingers too for that matter. They'd help amp up my web shooters with a couple of extra offensive features (he used them to bring down Venom for Christ sake!) but it wouldn't have worked out as beautifully as this if I _had_ used them. Metallo buckles, giving the big guy enough time to break out of the lock and grab him by one of those adorable metal love handles and send him on a one way trip to Painful Landingville. Thank God I had the sense to let go of the lines (Common, but Spider played a part to) or I'd be riding second class. Got enough of that on the ride over here.

"Everybody back!"

Yeah, the big guy can roar when he wants to. Like a lion in a Central Park zoo cage. And everyone actually _listens_. Even Jameson. Jameson for crying out loud. Hell, _I_ almost back up. I'd like to, but yeah, the whole superhero guest star thing…

Metallo's screaming again, but not in pain. Maybe it is, but there's this inhuman sound of pieces of metal doing nasty things to one another as he sags into himself, jaw snapping and cracking back into place as his skull sinks between his make-do shoulders, vanishing into the mass of shifting miss matched metal, a Rubik's cube turtle shell. Apparently standing up is too good for him now, so he's just going to pull himself apart and see what happens when he puts himself back together…with a twist.

Something shoving itself through the snake charmer dancing wires, bursting out of where his left lung would be, has a distinctive barrel quality. I'm half way through wondering what it's made out of, since I don't need to be the amateur physicist I am to know what it's for, when he's suddenly not there anymore. Super speed…_real_ super speed, not Speed Demon super speed is like that, a gaping black hole of nothing your brain says is something, the realization of the multi colored comet streak of a hyper accelerating body swimming it's way in drunkenly amongst the confusion.

Okay, what the hell was that? As far as I knew, this guy was Robot, Kryptonite heart and Angry Guy only. Where the hell did the Magneto rip off come from? Magnetism? Nanobots? Telekinesis? An upgrade the S.H.I.E.L.D database I looked at years ago neglected to mention?

Whatever it is must be what makes the thunder clap 300 feet overhead, clouds rippling in it's wake. Tinged with green. Not good.

I click both shooters closed after making sure the cartridges are totally secure, but I don't fire off any lines, not yet. Got a feeling I'll need a lot more in a couple of seconds. Another green thunder storm, and I'm scaling the still cooling hollows of floors and remaining layers of slightly hot concrete as fast as most humans can run, getting faster at each floor. People don't think I can crawl all that fast, but if I can shift my muscles into positions most vertebrates aren't supposed to why can't I do it quickly? Ever seen a fly crawl across a coffee table? And I have how many more muscles along with being an arachnid?

Clouds part by the time I reach the damp wood smelling roof, an elevated train track sagging in a cascade of metal and rubble as something whistles out and down into the street, ploughing through the track and sending a geyser of dust and asphalt bursting up as it hits the streets.

The clanging has died away as I reach it, perched on a roof ledge, sirens far off behind me. Another column of dust fountains out of the shadows of distant tower buildings about five blocks away. It dosen't do much for my confidence when the power flickers out in the distance, various street lights and windows dulling and flickering as I bounce off an over turned cab and into the street. Even in lower level mutant/meta human confrontations something powerful enough to black out an entire city block is usually a bad thing. Calm before the storm and all that, only in terms of mass panic before complete and utter panic. An earthquake before the hurricane.

At least I don't get strangled as I stupidly poke my head into the support beam strewn, almost perfectly circular hole punched into the street.

Even superheroes never get used to this, the sight of a crater actually made in solid asphalt, as if someone poked a pin through wet paper. We take it in stride, act like it's part of the job, and it is, but the fact humans, us, shouldn't be able to do things like that never quite goes away. No one knows what it's like to take your powers with you every step you take, out into the streets, your office, your favourite restaurant and back into your home at whatever too early hour of the morning you get back at. Not even the normal street level heroes or the non powered Avengers.

Not like all life suddenly stops, you adapt because (in most cases) your legs and brain still work, so you have to, but they don't exactly go away, like you just switch them off when your done and shove them in a kitchen draw. It's mainly the additions to the little things, like what my Spider Sense is doing now. Not warning, hence my head peering over the side like a red balloon with a giant phantom bull's-eye printed on it, but flickering, bunching a section of brain tissue up inside my head like paper and then letting go so it unfolds again. I recognise this, one of the oddities of the Sense that comes with me not being one hundred percent sure how it actually works. Sometimes I inadvertently track the neighbour's movements in the apartment above and below us, I can even push it out into the corridors as though filling the place with an invisible delta brainwave foam. It does this with radiation to, a subconscious Geiger counter reaching out and calling in any radiation above standard background level.

It's doing that now.

Maybe it's the left over charge in my blood stream from all those years ago, maybe whatever level my Spider Sense works on also includes radiation levels , or maybe once a scientist always a scientist and I'm nerdy enough to pick it up, but I know pretty much the second I look down there that it's not Metallo. I just feel stupid for doing it.

Something as subtle as a radiation signal would be lost in the natural, absolute amount of expected danger pouring off him, and I think it's him causing the sounds pouring up the street behind me, like far off carpentry. Something red flutters in the shadows like a bird flexing an un bandaged limb. I offer the big guy a hand as he floats towards me, shaking slightly as he brushes a stray pipe bigger and longer than my forearm, more by not noticing his shoulder bump into it than trying to clear his way. He takes it, breathing hard as I help him find his feet. The cape drapes around his shoulders as he finally reaches solid ground, his hands resting against his knees. I can feel the slight charge in the air clinging to him, a thin strand of cotton popping away invisibly through the air that I can trace with my finger. Not that I do.

"So…"

"Fine," he says, straightening up so he looks less like a red and blue sack that's just had the potatoes mashed out of it "Fine. Just need a second. A minute. Just a couple."

And I believe him.

It's got to be the strangest case of radiation poisoning you'll ever see. Not for the suddenness of a being theoretically capable of flying through the sun and out the other end reduced to the soft, fumbling gate of a two minute old kitten, but how you can actually _see_ the improvement leaking back into his face and arms, like a rock steadily growing out of the sea, until that's all that's left, sheer rock, smooth as marble and water drained under it.

"No problem."

The next explosion is considerably nearer.

"Of course, in a general sense…"

The night flashes red and blue as a mismatched convoy of SCU vans, ambulances and fire trucks flood from practically every street corner, filling every square inch, forming a barricade. I doubt it'll help, but I can appreciate it. What people are left on the streets vanish, startled by the roar of chopper blades overhead if not the sirens. Sawyer has an even larger rifle, more a cannon than anything else, as she strides towards me and the big guy. Turpin's voice carries over the whole thing, and it's hard to believe this was actually a street about twenty seconds ago.

"Standard procedure?"

"Of course Maggie. We'll try and keep him confined to wherever we intercept him if you can get the area around it cordoned off."

I probably shouldn't have waited until we were in the air to ask this, but…

"Standard procedure?"

He dosen't turn around as he flies just ahead of me, arms fully extended dead ahead, fists balled, bobbing in and out of my field of vision as I swing from line to line behind him.

"Isolate the area, like trying to stamp out a fire. In most metahuman instances the perpetrators are tough or fast enough for conventional fire arms not to matter. Not once civilians are behind cover."

His face appears behind a fluttering corner of cape.

"You may need to jump a lot."

"So what else is new?"

I remember that slight laugh sound that reaches me as we reach a block of uptown buildings, glass and steel glittering in what's left of the light like night time marble. Against the horizon, almost at the exact centre of Metropolis, moonlight streams around a black hole silhouette in the skyline, perfectly curved and outlined. Even though we're facing it head on as opposed to the side it's clear what it is: an initial. _The_ initial. Lexcorp Tower. I know from experience it's the first thing the tourists see when they touch down.

How far will a man go to mark his territory?

I say that, because out of the daylight, and from this angle it looks…sinister. Alien. Wrong. Too tall, too unreal. It's not that it isn't supposed to be here, it's that _you_ are not supposed to be here with _it_. And it's supposed to belong to the greatest good guy on the planet.

I've never really looked into the big guy's relationship with the Double L, but some general rumours suddenly make a lot more sense. I guess the atmosphere is appropriate because it's then that Metallo crash lands a mile ahead of us.

He's acquired two massive people carrier arms from somewhere, hydraulic pumps and whirring turbines hissing and clanking away as new ankles to handle the weight. There's a strange beauty to it, but Corbin's power reflects his mind: it's a brutal mess, unsubtle and uninspired beyond utter destruction. Much like the average online gamer.

"Smash yaaaaAAAGGGHHHHHH!"

"Subtle, ain't he?"

The big guy dosen't do the laugh thing. If he dose, I don't notice, my Spider Sense is too loud. A blast of Kryptonite radiation narrowly avoids removing my upside down genitals as it lances past, obliterating my webline seconds after I let go of it to flip down to street level. The big guy vanishes in a blast of red cape, arcing up, up and away from what was probably the equivalent of a LAW rocket to him. If I find out I'm sterile after this I'm going to be really annoyed.

Metallo's eyes glint as I bounce off a parked truck and cling to a nearby street light. Somewhere people are screaming, probably pointing at me, though I can't see them.

"Hey bright eyes. Miss me?"

"Not this time!"

"Good one. Make sure you write that down."

The big guy comes down on top of him seconds after he's picked up a chunk of road he was presumably going to throw at me. I manage to snag it with a webline and whirl it over my head like a mooring star without tearing my left arm off. Got the feeling I'm gonna need it. I'm right.

A rush of red and blue hurtles out off the crater faster than the multiple beams of sizzling green, Metallo's right arm juddering from multiple shots as he clambers out, clawing at the asphalt with his gigantic left. My make shift weapon sends him bouncing out and across the street, leaving a jagged liver shaped hole of broken bricks and smashed storefront window in the face of a building on the other side of the street. An old man in a green apron bolts out the door, and I feel a liver sized pang of guilt. Going up against this class of metahuman, you sometimes can't help but cause this kind of damage to someone's office or home while trying to make sure it dosen't happen to their kids or dog or grandparents.

At least it's done some good. Metallo's missing his left arm when he comes out, his original, smaller arm flailing and looking smaller than it actually is in the gap. Glass has smashed it's way into most of it and sparks flash off them as damaged wires pull themselves loose from it. The problem is there's not a lot someone of my physical strenght level can actually _do_ to someone like Metallo. I'm strong enough to bend steel, all the way round into two circles if I really try, but Metallo is a sentient frame wrapped in warped and fused shells of different shapes and sizes. There's a lot of steel to work through, and he can probably replace what I remove.

Better get a move on then.

Metallo lets out a startled boom box sound as I cannon into him, rocking almost fully backwards under my sudden, scrambling weight. I ram a foot into what passes for a solar plexus, since all I can really do is try and keep him off balance, using the leverage to wrench a collar bone shaped fender out off his chest. He dosen't fall apart quite like I'd kinda hoped he would, but my Spider Sense does go off as my legs slowly involuntarily part along with what turns out to be a set of plates making up Metallo's chests, bathing the immediate world green.

"Thanks. Downright hospitable of you."

I drive the thing into the glow, arms and spine juddering as it connects with something hard sooner than I'd expected. Metallo lets out the first genuine human sound I've heard him make all night, a sharp gasp of anger and fear, only missing something.

_Lungs_, I realise, _he hasn't got any lungs to actually gasp with._

He does have a heart though, something he's wired up to, feeding off of constantly. And I almost ploughed a stake clean through it. Probably not a good idea to still be on his chest when the shock wares off.

I don't quite make it. His right arm either connects with my back slightly, or the wind blows in the wrong direction and I'm rolling across the asphalt with the occasional bounce to almost rattle my spine out. I slip into a better landing position, and that's a good thing in the next seven seconds as his fist crashed down an inch from my toe. It dosen't come back up for a second go. A hand nowhere near the size of Metallo's smallest finger (their made out of pipes and joints and aren't all the proper size or length they should be) grips into his wrist, denting metal with out shattering finger nails. Something whirrs in protest deep inside it.

"Corbin…let's use our inside voice, please."

It's not a punch. It's a palm first explosion, Metallo suddenly wrapped around an abandoned truck. The skull head rattles like a tin can dropped down a sewer pipe.

"We have guests here."

"Oh."

He waits until the banging fades away after he drives a fist through the cab, the grin looking a lot more genuine. The big guy's eyes narrow dangerously, and I stand up quickly. My spine vibrates slightly as the semi engine revs. There's an undertone there, a stretching, snapping sound.

"They picked a lousy time to take a vacation."

"Hey, tell me about it. You come for the comic con, and the Klingon wedding ends in divorce."

My worst joke ever, but my back is killing me, so screw you and your tastes.

"Welcome to Metropolis! We're all mad here!" Metallo howls, and the entire front section of the truck cab is swinging around in a trail of maimed engine parts and shattered windscreen glass. What's left of the engine bursts out from under the bonnet, snapping like a machine gun magazine slotting into place, bolts and coils and twisted clumps of hot metal booming out like cannon fire head on towards us.

I'm thinking we're going to want to move pretty soon.

Or rather, I'm going to want to move, the big guy just plants his feet, thrusts out his chest and takes it. I'm already in the air as he vanishes into a billowing cape in the middle of a frothing orange cloud. I come down hard, feet banging on top of the make shift cannon. I'm well out of range of the projectiles, and Metallo's stopped out of sheer surprise, but I can still feel the shaking and heat beneath my sock thin boots. That gives me one of those insane adrenaline ideas, like sticking your hand in a lava pool so it won't snap off from a blast of liquid nitrogen. I thrust my hand into the darkness between the semi cab and his hand cannon.

It's a pretty simple, if mildly suicidal, theory. If he's carrying the front, he's carrying the dash, and if it belonged to one of those old fashioned ten four good buddy rednecks the dash is carrying…

Something the size of a quarter is suddenly between my thumb and forefinger, a faint heat floating through my fingers and vanishing into the back of my hand inches from where the spider bit me oh so many years ago.

Bingo.

"Hot potato!"

His socket bulges with a muddy brown light as I toss the cigarette lighter into his left eye.

I topple off his arm as his hands clamp over the skull face, grinning like a masochist as his clenched teeth almost explode out of his mouth from the scream. I wonder for a split second if he can actually perceive physical pain or it's just so much of a reflex he dosen't know how not to react to it.

Then the big guy is _there_, a sonic boom clothesline from an American flag blue arm.

Metallo looses his legs this time.

"Okay…okay, that's it…that is _it_!"

Street lights and cars bend and scream over the hurricane of my Spider Sense. I actually have to spring over a tilde wave of cars wrenched out of underground parking and up through the street, and when I land Metallo has two brand new legs.

Here we go again.

That cape snaps into reality in front of me, a dull but insistent thundering pinging billowing it back and forth like a tree caught in a storm. Metallo's trying the chain gun trick again. I love repetitive villains, someone you can really depend on, y'know?

The sound continues underground, the asphalt heating up as he lumbers into the pothole from hell he dredged up to put himself back together again, and the bad news is it's moving in the direction of all the king's men. God knows what it'll be like once he reaches the all the king's horses.

I shouldn't be joking should I?

The big guy armpits me ( I hate it when fliers do that. Every non flying hero does. I have webs. I can't break the sound barrier but I can move in the air, damn it. And the annoying thing is I don't think they realise they're doing it.) and I suddenly have absolutely no idea what to think other than I'm flying in _his_ arms. The sound of the barricade a good five miles behind us smashing apart like a rotted wooden fence brings me back to reality. Three vans have caught fire, two cop cars have been overturned, and Metallo is laughing off a wave of gunfire and laser blasts as he looms out of the exit he smashed through the street, his right hand clenched around a fourth van and wrapping it around his exposed original left arm as the cab writhes it's way into something approaching a usable hand.

I slip out of the firm grip, freefalling in total control towards the armour plates making up his back. Gunfire sprays over the metal shoulders, the light of useless slugs illuminating something I never noticed before, a small space between twisted slivers where Metallo's neck dosen't quite reach his torso. He must have had to telescope his neck up out of it's housing to see over his replacement chest. Either way…well, I always did have a predilection for shiny things.

Note to self: Find more ways to slip the word 'Predilection' into conversation. It'll make me look smart.

Note to self: Find out how to pronounce the word 'Predilection'.

Note to self: Find out what the word 'Predilection' actually means

Anyway.

I claw out a couple of times, finally managing to grasp the wire strewn column of metal that makes up Metallo's neck and spinal cord, and pull. The hulk of metal I'm cowboy riding spasms, arms flailing and components tumbling loose. Any and all gunfire still coming stops, Metallo vomiting sparks as his jaw unhinges and lets out a scream like a dying turbine. I slip my second hand into the gap and brace, pulling harder. It won't quite give…

A hollow snapping sound, like rigging ropes pulling apart, echoes deep down inside

Metallo and into my feet, the jerking getting worse. He must have woven an entire secondary nervious system out of jumper cables and power lines to compensate for the weight of the new body, and now I'm wrenching his exoskeleton free of what technically passes for his skin.

Sounds fun.

The chest and shoulders seem to sag suddenly, bending over and taking me further up. I can see the remains of Metallo's original body in the middle of it all. That fire really wasn't good for him. But it's coming loose, slowing him down as he panics. The Hulk sized arms loom up for me, twitching and snapping, but suddenly vanish in a flash of blue, the big guy pulling them down and forcing them up in the same breath, forcing Metallo back regardless of the Kryptonite danger. Metallo hisses at him either out of hate or pain.

The big guy's brought me more leverage though, and my struggling becomes more strained, cables and wires snapping and looping out of Metallo's solar plexus as I finally hoist his screaming body free. Feels like I just gave birth to the Scorpion. Who I know for a fact is twice my full body weight.

Metallo's elbow smacks into my chest, sending me slamming off the back plates and into the growing heap of metal that's all that's left of his hydraulic feet. I'm just lucky Metallo's body, now about a foot taller from the neck upwards, slumps _forward _out of the now useless cocoon. He'd crush me if he fell on me and I'm too busy cringing from pin pricks of metal _not quite _digging into my back to roll aside if I have to.

I forgot; the original's stronger than me too. It did give me something though, other than probable internal haemorrhaging. He didn't just go nuts from the pain when I pulled that stunt with his neck. He flat out panicked.

Decapitate him and this is all over.

There's a sound like a slinky spring being pulled backwards until it breaks and Metallo blurs across my field of view before crashing into a building a few stories up. My world is suddenly filled with the greatest flag for a utopian nation that never existed and the big guy is helping me up.

"Nice work. This turns things around."

"No problem."

I'm either wheezing from having a big metal elbow smack the wind out of me or smoke from one of the random fires that always start in things like this, but my New York accent sounds pathetically feeble against his Adam Baldwin breeze.

The revolving doors of the office building or hotel or whatever explode outwards, a blast of pure neon green slamming into the big guy and burying him in the remains of an over turned squad car.

So much for turning things around.

I can feel the heat coming off Metallo before my Spider Sense goes off, tossing myself down onto the asphalt and sliding into his assault rather than avoiding it. It pays off, he's startled by the offensive play. I throw myself up with the rather neat if painful trick of bouncing my spine off the ground, stretching my fingers as forward as they'll go. His skull is hot, like touching a radiator and that's why stage two isn't a complete success.

I don't have a stage three, but I don't have to come up with one. The enormous tank…car…jet…thing with it's big scary cannon clearly overcompensating for the some anatomical insufficiency in the driver blasts Metallo with this headache inducing pink beam of light, and he's suddenly resembling a skeleton even more, metal shavings and dust sparkling like glass as it falls off his shoulders like sand.

I remember this one adventure I had about four years back where I wound up in, supposedly, the year 2099. While this thing is probably a footnote (Or is going to be a footnote), a high tech horse and cart, that's the kind of thing we imagine when we hear that date. The stuff S.H..I.E.L.D scientists spend all night conceiving in underground bunkers and adamantaium soundproofed helicarrier labs.

"_ATTENTION CITIZENS."_

Oh yeah, anything that starts with those words always ends well…

"_PLEASE VACATE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY! THIS SITUATION IS OFFICIALLY UNDER DULY DEPUTIZED CONTROL THANKS TO LUTHOR CORPS ™ E.N.FORCER UNIT, A SUBSIDIARY OF THE SPECIAL CRIME'S UNIT." _

Gotta be a computer, no pilot or driver or whatever the hell kind of person would willingly climb inside that thing (Okay I admit it, I want a go) talks like that. I'm also not buying it. Sawyer look's too pissed for this thing to have been taken off a blueprint and translated on a million dollar assembly line.

The bad dialogue is the one reason we're all standing around like idiots, Metallo included. The big guy breaks out of the spell first, suddenly directly in "Eee-ehn-forsar's" path like a mountain jogging across an interstate highway. I'm expecting pretty much the same effect.

"Luthor, I don't…"

_ALERT! ALERT! HOSTILE EXTRATERRESTRIAL SUSPECT IDENTIFIED! E.N.FORCER CHECKING RECOMMENDED SOLUTION. SOLUTION REACHED. EXECUTING!"_

The air goes pink and then red in a blur of cape as the big guy leaps sideways.

"Nice."

I'm going to regret turning around, aren't I?

Metallo hoists Sawyer a foot of the ground, her combat boots jerking, teeth gritted and clawing like a panther at the skeletal hand clamped around her neck.

"I want one. This one dosen't work anymore. Here."

I'm already pounding towards him as he pulls his arm back and hurls Sawyer into the air, resisting the urge to boot him in the head as I leap past. There's a trick to catching people at this speed. This isn't like the bridge and Gwen, this is the fact that despite probably weighing less than Sawyer I've got thicker muscles than her and am moving at near bullet speed. If I hit her wrong I won't crush her but I'll break something at best, if I'm going faster than her (faster than I need to) the sudden stop of me catching her in mid air and landing with her may be too much. So I twist myself as much as possible in the slowed hyper seconds of speed perception and Spider Sense slow down, reducing and compacting as much momentum as I can. I'm beside her now as gravity catches up, bringing my arms around to circle her and closing the gap, squeezing tight as it closes. I complete the last rotation and bring my feet down, spreading my legs and bouncing as we come down. Three more and we come to a stop. She's winded but intact, so my work is done.

Who am I trying to kid?

Whatever that thing was in the transition between Metallo…interfacing with it, it's a Tim Burton parody of itself now, ragged tank treds, Corbin's naval and everything above it jutting out of a trash can pile of armour plates and circuitry. Megaton would puke.

"Mmmm…roomy."

"And too large to miss."

The burst of heat vision evaporates the sweat it's causing. Metallo just makes a hillbilly chuckle over the buzz of superheating air molecules. Part of me would kill to know what that plating's made of. It might just get the rest of me killed if I don't back up, the big guy's digging his heels into the asphalt, trying to angle a weak spot into his infra red rimmed line of vision even as he increases it's intensity.

"Cute."

Metallo grins in the after glow. He brings up a shifting arm.

"My turn."

I can tell the world goes white even with my eyes closed and my head turned away because with a sound that awful it just has to. Smoke pours from near molten asphalt, a few red rags drifting on the breeze, burning rapidly. I realise I can still hear the sound of an invincible body going clean through a brick wall as I notice dust pouring out of the hole pounded across two floors of apartment building. Metallo rounds on me, and my Spider Sense drags out his every syllable as my eyes dart everywhere faster than most fingers can move, looking for something, a rock, a hammer, a Superman Robot, _anything_…

"You got anything to say, Bug?"

And then I notice rubble, tires, pipes, metal, stone, glass…

And I get a really stupid idea.

"You're really fat."

I bounce off the front of his tank housing before he can blink, spring board off that and handspring off his skull to get myself airborne, firing twin bursts of webbing behind me, starting with the smaller stuff, shards pebbles, bundling it up and trailing a line to the next one, firing off another, attaching that to another bundle, jumping from wall to wall, running for my life from a roaring Metallo as he spins his new tires and streaks after me.

I'm doing this for two reasons: (A) It gets him away from the civilians and (B)…well, it's slightly selfish, but my camera's back this way. That last part is important because of reason (C), the reason Metallo can't see because he's trying to catch me like I'm the long lost childhood balloon he never had.

Five streets, and my arms are blurring with each bound, reaching, firing.

Four streets, I spin head over heels at one point, catch sight of Metallo, charging, roaring, and I think: This is Metropolis. This is what people in cafes and taxis and office blocks stare into every day.

Three blocks, I almost loose my stride but gain more altitude. For a second I'm worried (scared) he'll realise what I'm doing, but the fact he actually throws a parking meter at me says different. He's too stupid to figure it out, which will make this all the sweeter.

Two blocks, I'm running along the rooftops now, the sound and smell of that particle weapon thundering behind me, the full weight of all ten web lines in my hands straining against me, pinching and grabbing at my spine, seconds away from yanking it out for me if Metallo doesn't do it first.

Finally we're here, where I need to be. Which is good because my arms feel like they're getting run through an industrial size cheese grater. I leap left, the right, finally landing on a building angled away from the camera

See, I don't really have ten web lines, I have ten handfuls of webs, strands making large shapes out of thin lines, full of stuff I laced and bundled together from block to block, crisscrossed to make a gigantic slingshot looping from building to building behind him and bulging right in front of him.

Rubble, tires, pipes, metal, stone, glass…

All pulled together, all straining for release…

All pointed at him.

Pretty damn photogenic if I do say so myself.

"Say cheese, asshole…"

Then I let go.

The first thing to hit him is a stone the size of an eye ball, bouncing off his chest and clanging away inside his arm. He blinks. And then a piece of concrete the size of a door slams into his upper body, more rubble and metal crashing down on him. A steel pole stabs through the tank, upending him into the full force of the maelstrom, his cannon arm vanishing in a trail of glass, stone and sparks, and then another pole smacks his head off his shoulders like a golf ball. His body disintegrates in a rush of piling rubble vomiting a dust cloud the size of the surrounding apartment buildings. The only sound in the aftermath are the tinkling of broken windows and distant car alarms.

My breath echoes in my mask. My eyes are wider than the lenses.

Holy crap.

We won.

I leave his skull swaying and cursing from a street light just a few seconds away from what's left of the S.C.U convoy. Upside down of course. I figure Sawyer has a few choice words for him and Turpin needs something for target practice. That makes a great picture to.

I notice the crowd gathering around the crash site, feet blotting out the skid marks from Metallo's pursuit as people huddle together like dogs before feeding time. I hop over staring heads, hoist myself around a streetlight and land to a few startled gasps. There's a broad shouldered shadow coming out of the front entrance, hunched, almost like it's carrying something.

Figures the man of the hour would miss all the action.

"Hey Supes, nice work. When we're posing for the papers can…"

Then I see it. The small form in his iron hard arms. The look on his face like everything that held him together just melted.

_Oh no…_


End file.
